Steve Burke

By David Paul Morris/Bloomberg/Getty Images.

Bio

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Bio

The son of television executive Daniel Burke, Steve Burke grew up having industry-heavy family dinner-table conversations about “ratings and share when measuring television audiences,” wrote Forbes. Burke got his start first at General Foods, and then moved to Disney in 1986. He convinced then-Disney C.E.O. Michael Eisner to let him open Disney merchandise stores, a somewhat risky proposition. Eisner agreed, and it ended up paying off—Disney opened 700 retail stores. (Eventually, the retail stores became a financial burden, and Disney sold them to the Children’s Place in 2004).

Before arriving at Comcast, Burke, as chief operating officer, helped turn around a flailing Euro Disney, and he later became president of ABC Broadcasting. Since joining Comcast as president of Comcast Cable in 1998, the company has grown to become the nation’s largest cable company and provider of residential Internet service. Burke became C.E.O. of NBCUniversal in 2011, after NBC and Comcast’s programming assets merged as the result of a joint venture between Comcast and General Electric. “You really can create a lot of value by putting content and distribution together, particularly if the content is cable content,” Burke said at an industry conference. “The best businesses that all of us have in the entertainment business are cable content channels, which have a dual revenue stream. I think we would not be doing our job if we weren’t trying to figure out how to get bigger in those businesses.”

In recent years, under Burke’s watch, NBCUniversal has invested in younger media start-ups, including Vox and BuzzFeed. “One of the reasons we invested in Vox and BuzzFeed is to learn from them,” he noted at the 2016 Consumer Electronics Show. But, he added, “Broadcast television is still a very good business. . . . People are going to want to watch great television on a great television set.”